How important is it for your website address to match what you're naming your site....

Me too Gambino.

Most of us do this subconsciously.

Imagine if you visited espn.com and the banner said something different than espn? Even with a hyper established brand you'd be wondering what was wrong. Because we expect clarity. We expect the domain name and business name through text logos or headers or brand logos to match perfectly.

Otherwise, something feels off. And when feeling that off feeling we almost instantly bail on unknown brands and instead of proceeding on the page of established brands, we pause and hesitate, wondering what the problem is. Legal issues? Etc....

Ryan

If your domain is iserv.com then I would get a logo that said that. Then you could always use Unique Services as a subtitle and use that as a slogan on your site.
Like other's said: if you're not ranking high for Unique services then that probably would be a bad move if the url is different...

I have about 5 clients who told me that if they were to change, they would have a different domain name for their sites. Branding is very important, take your time to come up with the name. It is your identity, ua SP.

I would consider it a bad move, yes.

I started using the name EelKat in 1978. When I joined the internet in 1997, I used EelKat as my username, simply because it was easy to remember and all my friends and family knew me by that nickname, making it easy for them to find me online. It wasn't a business move when I did it, because back then, I was unknown and unheard of.

Since 1997 I have been "EelKat" online. Ten years of being "EelKat" everywhere, people around the internet (strangers) also started to identify me as "EelKat" everywhere, the same way offline family and friends had done.

I was EelKat everywhere. Everywhere.

Except for 1 place.

600+ social media and forum accounts all named "EelKat" later, one of my readers asked me a very important question...

"How do I find your website?"

I answered back. "It's SpaceDock13.com"

She replied back: "Why?"

I said, "Because it was a location the book series I was promoting at the time (1997) was set it."

She said: "But I never read those books, so how would I know that? Why aren't you on EelKat.com instead?"

A week later I bought EelKat.com and transferred my old site over to it.

Why? Because she was right. People looking for me online Google the search term "EelKat" not "SpaceDock13".

The change of the url did amazing things to my traffic. I went from 300 page views total across ALL pages per month, to 300 page views per page, per day.

People were searching for "EelKat" not "SpaceDock13"

It was the same website. Same pages. Same articles. The only thing that changes was SpaceDock13.com was renamed EelKat.com instead.

BOOM. traffic that stagnated at a few hundred a month, shot off to thousands a day.

Why?

Branding.

I did not set out to do branding when I created all those online accounts all with the username EelKat, because when I created them, I had no online business. I was just using them to talk to friends and relatives in various online places, but in the course of doing so I meet several tens of thousands of new online friends, people I never marketed too, people I just talked to on forums and chats... people who over time came to know me as "Hey, that's EelKat" And so when I did move to online business, EelKat was the brand name people knew me as. It was therefore logical for people who searched for me, to do so, by searching for "EelKat" and not anything else. In most cases the searchers did not know my real name or my book titles, so had no reason to search for me by them.

Now, back in 1997, SpaceDock13 seemed like the perfect site name because the site at the time was promoting those books. However, in the 20 years since then, my website evolved, and those books got pushed to a single page in the archive, while the site went on to focus on me, my life, my career, my books, my cars, my family history, etc. And so over time, SpaceDock13 was no longer a meaningful url for my site. It no longer made sense.

The way I look at it now, is the site is an extension of my business, my career, my brand. In the entertainment industry, your stage name is your brand, your business, and thus, should be your site url as well. While any topics within your site, can be organized on a page level, via the keywords in the url.

For example:

My url is my brand name (EelKat), then each page is my keyword

brandname.com/keyword (EelKat.com/Title-of-New-Book)

People looking for me, search "EelKat", whereas people searching for my new book, search by typing the title of the book. Having the url being my brand name, and the keyword long tail being the book name, Google sends BOTH types of searchers to the page, resulting in more traffic coming my way.

Each keyword, has dozens of relevant similar keywords, resulting in LOTS of pages about 1 topic, which in turn alerts Google to the fact that this site is about one topic, because the topic is all over the site, in headers, page titles, text body, etc, rather then just in the url.

For example, I make a page for the book series, then a page for each book in the series, then a page for each character, then a page for each question asked by readers, and then create an index for just that group of pages.

The home url (EelKat.com) is the Tier 1, the Topic Index is the tier 2, and the pages linked from that index are the tier 3 pages. By creating a separate index for each topic, you create a pyramid structure, which makes it easier for Google to index your pages. In turn making it easier for customers to find you.

And by making it easy for Google to index your site, you've also made it easier for your clients to find your business, by finding your site through Google search.

For example, let's pretend you are a cat groomer in Maine, your business name is Sudds. The best url for you would be sudds.com and then make each page keyword named, with pages titled stuff like:

sudds.com/Cat-Grooming-Hours-And-Location
sudds.com/Holiday-Specials-On-Cat-Grooming
sudds.com/Cat-Grooming-Prices
sudds.com/Grooming-Your-Cat-At-Home
sudds.com/Best-Way-To-Bath-Your-Cat
sudds.com/Removing-Cat-Hair
sudds.com/Cat-Breeders-In-Maine
sudds.com/Best-Shampoo-For-Long-Haired-Cats
sudds.com/Do-Sphinx-Cats-Need-Bathing
sudds.com/Should-White-Cats-Be-Bleached
sudds.com/Cat-Boarders-In-Maine
sudds.com/How-To-Brush-Your-Cats-Teeth
sudds.com/Painless-Nail-Trimming-For-You-And-Your-Cat
sudds.com/Cat-Vets-In-Maine
sudds.com/Best-Brush-For-Persian-Cats

The url being named the name of the company, makes it easy for customers to find the URL. (People who search for you using the brand name "Sudds") And it helps people who don't know you yet, find you by topic (People who search for the topic "cat groomers near me")

Every page having a long tail keyword, makes it easy for your customers to search within your site to find the page they are looking for.

Every page of the site being long tail keywords also tells Google your topic is Cat Grooming In Maine. It helps Google index your site in the proper categories and helps get the correct traffic to you (people who live in Maine and are searching for local cat groomers)

So, in the end, my advise to you on this, is to think about what you business name is, will people be searching for you by that name?

Ask yourself, how will people find you? what search terms will they use? Will they search for your brand name or will they search for your product?

For some businesses, especially very small ones, it may be better to have a topic based keyword. For others, that may be a bad choice.

I'm an author. I write Dark Fantasy novels. But very few people who visit my site, know I'm either an author or know the titles of my books. The keywords "Dark Fantasy" or "Quaraun" (the name of the books) are not what people search for to find me. No. People search for the "brand name" EelKat instead.

Think of it this way... when you want to go shopping at your local WalMart but it's late and you don't know if they've closed forr the night yet... so you head to Google to find out...

Do you search for:

"hours of my local super market"

or

"hours of Biddeford, Maine, WalMart"

The first search will tell you the hours of HUNDREDS of stores in a 50 mile radius of your current computer location.

The second ones sends you straight to WalMart.com, to the page for the store in Biddeford, Maine.

Now if WalMart had a url that was anything other then WalMart.com, do you think, that exact search for that exact brand name, would have resulted in that exact site being #1 on page 1 of Google?

No.

Why?

Brand name in url is why.

Google knew you wanted WalMart.com when you searched for "walmart" and so that's what Google gave you.

In short, the brand name url makes it easier for customers to know WHAT to search for and at the same time it makes it easier for Google to index you and give customers what they are searching for.

Brand name in url is the thing I would have done differently. I started my website in 1997 with the url SpaceDock13 and never had traffic. I changed it to my brand name EelKat in 2013 and have had lots of traffic ever since. Just think how different things would have been, if I had started out with EelKat.com in 1997 instead of waiting until 2013 to change it to that?

I personally think band name in your url is one of the top, possible even the #1 most important thing, you should do when starting your business.